Kerry believes that the agenda sketched out in Grand New Party,

would privilege women who opt for the life course social conservatives have set for them: heterosexual marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Because I think the culture in which we live already pushes women into various roles as caretakers and compromisers, I'd rather the state not compound pressures toward gender conformity.

I think that the economy we live in pushes parents into various roles that make caring for loved ones difficult if not utterly impracticable, and that the privileging of market labor in the tax code exacerbates this effect. I'll also note that we're very keen on gender neutrality in the book.

Kerry also believes that we're promoting pro-nationalist over pro-globalist constituencies. But of course we're both strongly pro-trade, and I'd argue that much of the domestic policy activism is meant to strengthen the pro-trade coalition. Also, we're agnostic as to what an eventual immigration settlement will look like, with perhaps a slight bias toward tilting the immigration balance in favor of skilled rather than unskilled labor as a means of addressing concerns from wage dispersion -- Will Wilkinson has made a related (incremental) case for Marketplace with regards to H1-B visas.

To Chris Hayes' point: At the risk of sounding like an imbecile, I have to say, the ... I don't want to say demonization. The ...discomfort with the political influence of the rich strikes me as mostly misplaced. I tend to see the rich as a combination of monomaniacal eccentrics who overvalue market labor, fabulously inventive people who've found a niche and like to accumulate, people who've inherited wealth and will either be crippled by deep-seated psychological turmoil or will be pretty dull and uninteresting. In contrast, I genuinely believe that not having much money but having a lot of friends, relatives, and fun and engaging projects is a far more interesting and appealing life, in part because rich eccentrics have made things like toilets extremely cheap and accessible.

To be sure, I see the logic in skimming off some of the wealth of the wealthy to fund a basic minimum. Unacceptable poverty still exists in this country, and more starkly around the world. We should, of course, be wary of destroying wealth in the process. And then there is the matter of the self-respect of the beneficiaries, and whether money will solve problems caused by worklessness, which strikes me as a distinctive social problem. But broadly speaking, I don't worry about the rich. I'm mostly indifferent to them. I recognize that gun crime in struggling neighborhoods is the product of a thick tangle of pathology, the normative effects of mass incarceration, and worklessness caused in no small part by bad public policy. Obesity has similarly hard-to-disentangle causes. Neither is really about the rich. Both are big deals. What if the top third of the wealth distribution were much poorer, as in Sweden, and the bottom third were in the same place, as in Sweden? I mean, it would be worse in some respects, definitely. It would be better in others if we had high-quality public services, but of course money has less to do with that than ethos and historical circumstances, which are hard to manufacture via punitive wealth transfers alone. Even with all the resources in the world, the industrial organization questions and the cultural questions persist.

Chris Hayes refers to "billionaire libertarian cranks." I actually think this is a useful framework -- the Liberty Lobby that fought the New Deal was essentially, as David Frum pointed out recently, the coalition that opposed Prohibition. I doubt they opposed Prohibition because they were hard drinkers -- they didn't like it because it offended their deeply held beliefs. Same goes for the estate tax. "But if people understood that the estate tax doesn't apply to them!" Well, they often do. Some small minority also understands that the estate tax is a pretty bad way to generate revenue -- much worse than, say, a broad-based consumption tax like a VAT, which, incidentally, seems to generally be the best way to finance heavy redistribution.

I could point to the teachers unions and their weight in Democratic politics -- more delegates to the DNC than California, they control California's state budget, etc. -- as part of a conspiracy against "the children." But there's more to it. Ideology plays a big role. I believe that most members of public sector unions believe they are contributing not only to their own well-being but that of all working people. And in some sense they could be right. The same goes for champions of the dividend tax cut! Could it be that only right-wing elites are narrowly self-interested and left-wing elites aren't? The truth is that the politically engaged are generally weird. They enjoy spending time with Jan Schakowsky and raising money for Rod Blagojevich's legal defense fund more than, say, recording themselves singing a cappella versions of Elvis Costello songs, my preferred leisure activity. Fortunately, the damage they can do is limited by the fact that we still have a relatively decentralized society.

But what about the upward redistribution of wealth! I'd submit that a lot of the shift in the inequality picture has to do with demographics, in particular the age of the population and the skill distribution. More educated populations tend to be more unequal. Pre-tax inequality in northern Europe will likely rise for similar reasons. But those countries also have an escape valve: ease of migration to desirable, prosperous economies. What would Canada's inequality picture look like if huge numbers of Canadians didn't emigrate to the United States during their peak earning years? Very different.

So yes, the political scene has a lot to do with the inequality picture -- but not in the ways we think. For example, our welfare state is at least as big as those you see in other advanced market democracies when you add in tax subsidies. It's just that ours was devised in the 1930s through the 1960s, and has been half-heartedly tinkered with since then. We didn't have the "advantage" of a massive invasion or wartime calamity to clear the decks and build a 1950s to 1970s era welfare state. Which means, incidentally, that we have the opportunity, at least in theory, to leapfrog. Monica Prasad is very informative on the ways in which France and West Germany were, as modernizing developmental states, to the "right" of Britain and the U.S. in the pre-1979 era. Definitely worth a look.

Now for a brief theoretical reflection: When I was in college, approximately ten million years ago, I followed with great interest a debate in Critical Review between two scholars -- Ilya Somin, who will be familiar to some of you as a libertarian law professor and occasional blogger, and David Ciepley, who has since become one of my favorite intellectual historians. Very crudely, Somin argued that pervasive public ignorance meant that the normative claims advanced on behalf of democratic politics were built on a basic misunderstanding. There was no realistic way democratic citizens could engage in surveillance of a massively complex regulatory state, and so democracy could only be redeemed by radically narrowing the scope of government -- that is, to reduce the cognitive burdens of government.

I found this argument interesting and theoretically neat, yet there were some nagging historical questions. For example, democratic (or quasi-democratic) governance has been extremely thick for much of American history, only it was traditionally more decentralized. In some sense, as Tyler Cowen has argued, we've become freer as the regulatory state has grown, as local regulatory regimes -- focused on the moral-intimate dimensions of life, grew weaker. This, of course, doesn't speak directly to Somin's point, but it's worthy of note.

Ciepley introduced a more powerful objection. It is not just the regulatory state that is complex. Modern societies are complex. And the project of "depoliticizing" large swathes of public life is itself a political effort, one that demands constant democratic restraint. You can't simply take certain issues "off the table" through, say, the intervention of the courts. Why? Because, as FDR's court-packing ought to remind us, determined democratic majorities will basically do whatever they want. Our deeply ingrained respect for the idea of a constitutional order masks the fact that our constitutional order is, of course, substantively different from the one that prevailed pre-Lochner, and perhaps even pre-Scalia. But who believes that the Supreme Court can sharply turn against the supposed "will" of, say, 70 percent of the public? A friend of mine -- a social democrat, by the way -- insists that a federal health insurance mandate would be unconstitutional. Who seriously believes that such legislation would ever be overturned?

I'm getting a little far afield here from Ciepley's point, but I think it's an important one. I'll also note that Ciepley wrote a truly marvelous book on the history of America's ideological landscape, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism. The argument, in a nutshell, is that the encounter with totalitarianism led American liberals, on the left and right, to reconceive liberalism as the negation of totalitarianism, which is to say as a reflexive anti-paternalism. This is despite the fact that American political ideologies tended to be moralistic and forthrightly favorable towards certain kinds of public paternalism. This was particularly true of the Progressive left, and (I think) of the Whigs before them.

Ciepley argues that totalitarianism warped economic thinking, by encouraging an analytical anti-statism. I'm not sure he's entirely right on this front, but it's interesting to see how scholars on the left and right have, in their various ways, sought to "bring the state back in" over the past couple of decades. He also argues that certain strands of civil libertarianism, particularly those that rely on juristocracy over persuasion, have their roots in the same phenomenon.

I mention all of this because I think it provides useful context for libertarians. I have a lot of strong libertarian sympathies, though I think my instincts are informed more by what Jonathan Rauch has called "soft communitarianism" -- that is, a sense that rights-based, legalistic approaches can often undermine stable moral settlements and compromises that are reached in decentralized, ad hoc fashion -- than by the Razian project of liberalism as moral perfectionism.

So that's why I'm a defender of evasiveness when it comes to some moral questions. I believe that pro-family policies are good for a lot of reasons -- as Ross suggests, we were all children once, and some of us, myself included, continue to behave like children; pro-family policies are a way of spreading the benefits of an open economy, and increasing the perceived legitimacy of an open economy; child-rearing constitutes an investment, and the stance of liberal neutrality in this instance is not neutral at all when it treats child-rearing as classical consumption, etc. But I recognize that many potential
political allies, across the political spectrum, will embrace these policies for different reasons. I am all for, to use Cass Sunstein's term, incompletely theorized agreements. And you might be too! That's the beauty of them.

Another thing I'd like to mention. Ross cited a George Osborne speech that I also very much enjoyed, which drew on a lot of the intellectual spadework done by Iain Duncan Smith and Oliver Letwin among others. It follows hot on the heels of another speech, by David Cameron, on how government can encourage personal and social responsibility, which Andrew Sullivan has tied to Barack Obama's remarks concerning fatherhood. And of course Bill Clinton raised similar themes, as did George W. Bush, who once promised a responsibility era. Etc., etc. What makes the British Conservatives different is that they intend to reshape state institutions in such a way that civil society elements can take ownership of them, and rise or fall on their own merits. This is, as everyone understands, a really long-term process. People forget that there is a long tradition of anti-statism on the left, rooted in class solidarity and a belief that communities of competence were preferable to dependent communities. On the other side of the Atlantic, parts of the right are rediscovering this mostly forgotten tradition -- of friendly societies, of robust self-government -- and Grand New Party is in part about building on this intellectual rediscovery, and translating it into an American idiom.